A House by the Side of the Road (3 page)

The bottle dropped from his fingers and rolled heavily away. He staggered toward the sink, overwhelmed with nausea. When his stomach stopped heaving, he knelt beside the woman. There was a widening pool of blood under her head. He pushed her silky hair aside and put two fingers against her neck. Her pulse was faint and irregular.

He stood, swaying, and looked at her. Her skull was fractured, that was evident. He went into the living room and lifted the receiver of the phone, which responded with a dial tone. She hadn't canceled the phone service; he could call for help. No one would be able to recognize his voice if he whispered.

No. He replaced the receiver. If she survived, he might be able to make her understand that the whole thing was a horrible accident. But if she died, there would be an investigation. A careful investigation. Before he called anyone, he had to wipe away any prints he'd left—on the bottle, his glass, the faucet. That wouldn't be enough. He had touched things in her room, in the bathroom, the handle of the door …

It was while he was scrubbing frantically at the bourbon bottle that he remembered what she'd said. She had proof. She couldn't. What proof could there be? Photographs would prove nothing. A diary or notes would be awkward, but not proof. What could she have meant?

Damn his rage! That hadn't been him, that violent man. He wasn't an animal. He was a calm, reasonable person and intelligent enough to stay out of trouble. If she had been telling the truth—she couldn't have been telling the truth—but, if she had been telling the truth, she had something. What? Maybe she'd sent it on to Boston. No, probably not, or why would she have said, “Right here.” In the house?

What proof?
There couldn't be. But if there was, it meant he couldn't risk having the house unavailable to him. It could not be sealed off with yellow tape, could not be searched by anyone but him.

He went through the rooms methodically, wiping the surface of anything he might have touched. That required little thought, so he concentrated on what he would need to do. He had no time. The new owner was arriving almost immediately. He had tonight, he knew. Did he have tomorrow night? He couldn't count on it.

He had to be both thorough and efficient, which meant he needed a plan. It took some time, but he worked it out while he listened to the quiet of the night and waited for Angie to die.

Four

Sunlight was bouncing off the hood of the car and the narrow road it traveled. Meg Kessinger drove with her left elbow resting on the open window. She made small contented noises from time to time, breathing in the soft Pennsylvania air with its mingled faint scents of freshly turned earth and growing things. Around one of the curves ahead, the house would lie off to the right—her great-aunt's house for many, many years. Her own house now.

She drove slowly, gazing to the right and left at farms and fields and trees and the occasional house set well back from the road, sometimes stone or brick, usually tidy white frame with a generous porch. She had passed through Harrison, the closest source of grocery stores, druggists, and a library, ten minutes before, delighting in its air of settled stability and the huge park that seemed to take up a good sixth of the town. She knew the weeks to come would contain hours of anxiety about her decision to leave Chicago, but at the moment she felt only euphoria. Her most treasured possessions filled the trunk and backseat. The rest should arrive tomorrow morning, if the movers were as good as their word.

Just beyond a pretty little house with a huge tree in the front yard, from which hung a swing, a hand-lettered sign caught her eye:
DAFFODILS
—500 yards.” The sign, attached to a stake at the edge of the road, was a new one, unbattered by wind or rain, so the chances were it was accurate. Meg looked eagerly down the road, slowing more as a small roadside table came into view. Another sign was taped to its edge: “
DAFFODILS
—Picked Today.” The table held only a small metal box and a stack of newspapers, but next to it stood a washtub filled with flowers. Behind the table, which was shaded by a cluster of tall trees, sat a girl in a lawn chair, reading a book and scratching her ankle.

Meg eased onto the shoulder and braked, and the girl looked up from her book and smiled shyly. She was about twelve, with shoulder-length tawny hair and thick bangs above wide hazel eyes. There were grass stains on the knees of her jeans. Presumably, she could verify the “Picked Today” claim.

Meg got out of the car and gestured toward the washtub. “They're beautiful,” she said. “How much are they?”

“Seventy-five cents a bunch,” the girl replied. “There's a dozen in a bunch. Or three bunches for two dollars.”

Meg looked at the flowers. She wanted every single one of them. “I'll take six bunches,” she said. She dug into a back pocket and extracted a crumpled five-dollar bill. “Keep the change,” she said. When the child hesitated, she went on, “Consider it a bribe to be nice to your new neighbor. I'm moving in down the road.”

The girl took six dripping bunches of daffodils out of the tub and wrapped them loosely in newspaper. She handed them to Meg and declined the proffered bill. “Housewarming,” she said.

“Oh, but you worked to pick them!” said Meg, dismayed. “Please let me pay you.”

“Mom would have a fit,” said the girl. “You can buy some tomorrow or next week, if you want. But not today.”

“In that case,” said Meg, “I'd like six more. Today.” The second she spoke, she regretted it. She did not know this child and, therefore, this child did not know her. It was unfair to tease a stranger, especially one so young. But the girl's laughter was immediate.

“I'm
so
sorry,” she replied, motioning toward the scarcely diminished tub. “There aren't any left.”

Aha, thought Meg with relief, laughing. “I'm Meg Kessinger,” she said. “I'm moving into a house down that way.” She gestured toward the east. “The one that used to belong to Louise Marriott. She was my great-aunt.”

The child nodded. “You'll be right next door. Mrs. Marriott's house is the next one. I remember her from a long time ago, and my mom used to visit her in the nursing home. There was another lady living there for a while, but a moving truck came on Friday, and yesterday her car was gone.”

“Yes,” said Meg. “A renter. Aunt Louise left her house to me, and I decided to move in, so the renter moved out. Do you have a name?”

“Gosh, I'm sorry! I'm Jane. We're the Ruschmans. There's me and Mom and Dad and Teddy. He's seven.”

“And you're … thirteen?” It was wiser, thought Meg, to err toward older. The opposite of dealing with adults.

“Twelve,” said Jane. She looked at Meg curiously. “Are you, like, a Boy Scout leader or something, Ms. Kessinger?”

Meg glanced down at her dark green shirt with the embroidered “Boy Scouts of America” above the right pocket in red. “No, I just like the shirt.”

“So do I,” replied Jane, settling back into her chair and picking up her book. “I'll tell Mom we've got a new neighbor. She'll be glad.”

A dog came bounding down the driveway, barking an excited greeting, and Meg stooped to welcome him. “Hey, good-looking,” she said, ruffling his ears as he pushed his head against her and wriggled happily. He was a large, burly, well-shaped dog, a young Labrador with a cream-colored coat. He jumped against Meg, knocking her onto the ground and licking her face.

Jane got up. “Get off, Harding!” she said, tugging at his collar and yanking him away.

“It's okay,” said Meg, getting to her feet. “He didn't mean any harm, and none was done. What a gorgeous guy! Harding?”

“Uh-huh. Actually Warren G. Harding, but Mom's the only one who ever uses his whole name, and she only does when she's mad. She's the one who named him. She says he's handsome and sociable but has no reliable moral center.”

“Well,” said Meg. “He's young…”

“Just barely a year,” said Jane. She patted him affectionately. “Do you think he might
get
a moral center?”

The dog whined, rising onto his back feet and hopping in place as he lunged against the restraint.

“Sure,” said Meg. “Give him time.”

She raised her free hand in farewell and placed the flowers carefully on the passenger seat. Pulling back onto the road, she drove around the curve. “Right next door” proved to be about a quarter of a mile away. As the house came into view, she pulled onto the shoulder again and stopped to look at it from a distance.

It was old and shabby, but the graceful proportions shown in the photographs Meg had received were even more evident to her now. It was a low house with a wide front porch and a huge, unkempt lawn and had been painted, seemingly many years ago, a shade of yellow that had faded under the onslaughts of sun and rain to a dim, unattractive hue. Rosebushes grew in abandon against the walls and the picket fence that stretched, with noticeable gaps, from the house almost to the road, across the front of the property, and then back again.

The roses, sturdy and tangled, were just beginning to get leaves. It would be a while before they bloomed; no telling what colors they would reveal as spring turned to summer. Tulip foliage had emerged near the house, and the earliest flowers were beginning in pink and white and yellow. There was a driveway on the left side of the house. From it, by following a flagstone path, one could arrive at the front porch. A second door, on the side, presumably to the kitchen, had only a stoop.

Meg sighed with satisfaction. She knew the property needed work, large amounts of work. First she would have to fix the fence so the puppy she planned to get would be safe from traffic. The house sat back a good distance, but cars moved swiftly on country roads.

Pulling into the driveway, she stopped again to look more closely at the fence. The posts looked all right; the problem seemed to be simply one of missing pickets. If so, repairs would be easy. The house itself would probably present more difficult challenges, but this she did not mind. Her anxiety about moving to a house seen only in photographs had been based on the worry that, in real life, it wouldn't be a house she felt anything for. That was not going to be the situation.

There would be furniture inside—furniture she had been warned she wouldn't want—but the Salvation Army truck was scheduled for the next morning to haul away whatever she rejected. With any luck, it would arrive before the moving truck came with her possessions.

She eased the car down the driveway, which curved around the back of the house, and stopped. There was no door in the back except for cellar doors slanting up from the ground and held shut with a padlock through their handles, so she walked back around to the side. She gazed at the cracked cement of the kitchen stoop, seeing herself seated there in a faded cotton housedress, a crockery bowl in her lap, snapping the ends off green beans with competent efficiency. She smiled at the vision, in which her sturdy frame had attenuated and her skin had a delicate blush from the sun. No, five feet three was, at thirty, as tall as she would ever be, and it was no more likely that she would become as slender as her vision was than that she would begin to wear housedresses. A crockery bowl would be simple to get, however, and the beans were just a matter of digging up some piece of this suddenly acquired forty acres and recalling what she'd once known about planting vegetables.

She couldn't decide whether to get out her key and go in the house or walk across the meadow and through the wooded section at the back of the property to find the creek. She knew there was a creek. Michael Mulcahy, the lawyer who handled her great-aunt's will, had described the land in detail when she'd called him after receiving his letter, one from her great-aunt, and the photographs.

“It has live water,” he had said on the phone, and she had needed to ask what that was. “Sorry,” he said. “A creek, as opposed to a lake or pond. It's your back boundary.”

“Rock bottom or mud?”

“Rock,” he replied. “Your property is generally level, but you're close to the mountains.”

A rock-bottom creek! Her hesitations fell away. “So it babbles?”

“I guess.” His voice betrayed perplexity. “It curves up from the south to border your land. I only saw it the once, when Louise was making her will sometime back, and I wanted to know what all was involved in the real property part of her estate. Is babbling important?”

“To me,” sighed Meg. “Don't sell it. I want it.”

The lawyer was silent a moment. “You mean you want to come see it.”

“No, I want it. I can't afford to come see it. I don't have the time or the money. My landlord is selling the building I live in, and the new owners want my apartment, so I've been looking. I have to be out in five weeks. I will be. I'll move to my new house. Send me directions and a key.”

“Don't you have a job?”

“It's portable.”

“Look,” he said, “I wouldn't advise this. You may regret it. If you want the place, it's yours. Of course. But there are people who'd buy it, people who want the land. You could sell the place and buy something in Chicago. You don't have to move here to benefit from this inheritance.”

Meg's decision seemed not to fit with this lawyer's plan. “Yeah, well, I can sell it next month if I hate it,” she said. “And I'll know better what price to ask.” That was as pointed as she felt justified in being without having even met the man, but she wondered if he was one of the people who'd be willing to buy.

She thought for a few days that she was undoubtedly insane and then decided she didn't care. She concentrated on the positives. She could plant flowers, get a dog, hear crickets. She could take her cartons and cartons and cartons of books out of storage and have room for them. She could live someplace she wouldn't have to leave until she wanted to, if she wanted to. She could never run into Jim again. All because of a great-aunt she had barely known, a woman who had paid one visit to her family and sat for hours helping seven-year-old Meg expand her list of names for horses.